


mysterious lights

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, season 1 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 18:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16728867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: Prompt: AU where Melissa is abducted rather than Samantha but Mulder and Scully's roles are the same.





	mysterious lights

**1.**  November 27, 1973. In Greenwich, Connecticut, Fox and Samantha Mulder poke idly around their new house. They bicker about the biggest bedroom. Their mom calls up the stairs for them to unpack. They ignore her. They’re bizarrely thrown by this new life of this, the new house and the sudden absence of their dad from their life. They have no idea where he is, no idea where to call him, and their mother won’t say anything.

They end up sitting on the bare floor of the big bedroom. Samantha digs the Stretego board out of a box and begs her brother to play. After a lot of begging, with a sigh, Fox complies. The two play Stretego until their mother calls them for dinner.

In San Diego, Maggie Scully leaves her children home alone for an hour while she drives to the store. With four kids, a trip to the grocery store is always a headache, and Billy and Missy always insist that they’re old enough to be in charge, at thirteen and eleven. She wouldn’t usually leave them, but they’re pleading, and she has no help from Bill, so she leaves Billy in charge and leaves, intending to be back as soon as possible.

She gets caught in traffic. She gets caught up in talking to a friend. She gets home much later than she meant to, and is horrified to find three of her children huddled in a corner. Billy shielding the others, shaking, clutching his old Little League baseball bat. Nine-year-old Dana and five-year-old Charlie clutching each other’s hands, Charlie whimpering, Dana’s cheeks red and smeared with tears. Melissa isn’t there. Melissa is nowhere to be found.

Billy and Dana don’t remember a thing, they insist. Not a thing. Charlie is sucking his thumb, clinging to his sister when his mother offers little comfort, and he says in a soft voice, “It was the lights. She was taken by the lights.”

**2.**  Melissa is never found. They look for nearly a year; Bill Scully comes home from sea, and organizes search parties, and holds his wife as she weeps in the kitchen. Billy tries to help search, and his face falls when he’s told no; one particular member of the search party wants to know why Billy couldn’t protect his sister, and he locks himself in his and Charlie’s room and won’t come out. Dana tries to help, too, but is largely overlooked in comparison, largely ignored. She lets Charlie sleep in Missy’s bed and color on their floor and looks towards the door every few minutes, as if her big sister is going to come running back in.

After a year with no leads, Missy is officially declared dead. They buy a headstone and throw a funeral and dress in uncomfortable black clothes. Billy avoids eye contact with everyone, Charlie refuses to leave Dana’s room. He clings to Missy’s bedpost, screaming, “She’s not dead!” Dana knots her hands in the hem of her black dress and stares at the hole in the ground, chews at her lower lip. She doesn’t know what to believe.

Maggie grows protective, moreso than she was before. She doesn’t want to let them walk to school. They have to come straight home after school. They can’t play outside very much, and she never, ever leaves them alone. Billy conforms, becomes quiet and stern and murmurs things about joining the Navy out of high school. Charlie rebels openly, tries to run away, sneaks out of the house, throws temper tantrums until he grows out of them. Dana rebels inwardly. She’s always been the quiet one. She cleans her room— _her_ room, now, Missy isn’t there, and they make Charlie move out—and does the dishes and walks with Charlie to school, even when she’s going to a different school, holding his hand in hers. She thinks about her sister, about the disappearance and the search, and how she’s dead now, even though there’s no body. About how they’ll never know what happened to her. About how she wasn’t able to help her. She doesn’t remember that night, not really, but she remembers something small: clutching at Missy’s hand. Billy yelling and Charlie crying, and she held Missy’s hand until she couldn’t anymore.

They move to Maryland eventually. Charlie is furious; he doesn’t want to leave Melissa behind, he says, and their mother blinks hard and tells him not to be silly. Dana is reading books that make her mother blink disapprovingly. She tells her mom that she thinks she wants to be a police officer, and her mother shakes her head and says no, says if we lost you, says I already have a son and a husband in the Navy. She resents that she can’t join the Navy herself, like she knows Charlie does. She turns to medical school instead. She tells her mother she wants to be a doctor, but inside, she’s thinking pathology. She wants to find answers, the answers she never had for Melissa. She wants to find the people who hurt other people, she wants justice.

Dana goes off to college and takes her brother’s phone calls and studies furiously. She bonds with her roommates and thinks about her sister, wonders if they would’ve been close like this. Painting fingernails on the bed and whispering secrets back and forth. Dana wonders what her sister would’ve thought of her. She misses her, at times like this.

Her college years are strange, muddled and confused. Charlie gets in a furious fight with their mother and runs away, for real this time. He comes to her first, promising to keep in touch, making her promise to tell their parents he is okay. She has an affair with her professor that makes her feel horribly ashamed, foolish and guilty. She fights with her parents—over Charlie, over Melissa, over her job path—more often than she ever thought she would.

When the FBI recruiter comes, years later, Dana doesn’t hesitate for a second.

**3.** She is furious when she’s assigned to the X-Files, initially. It couldn’t be further from her plans, her goal of joining the FBI to help people; she’d thought she was doing so well, and now she’s being assigned to investigate fucking ghosts and goblins and aliens? It disgusts her. She has better things to do.

Her mind is changed almost immediately after meeting Agent Mulder. He’s charismatic and goofy, and he makes her laugh. He makes a good first impression. He’ll make a good partner, she finds herself thinking after that first case. And she was wrong, about the X-Files not helping people. It’s not the way she ever would’ve expected, but she is helping people. She is.

The thing that surprises her, she thinks, is how much Mulder wants to be her friend. He argues with her easily, the believer to her skeptic, but he seems to like her as much as she likes him. He asks her out to drinks, he introduced her to his friends (“They’re paranoid as shit, Scully, it’s kind of funny,” he says), he always waits for her to finish with autopsies or reports or the like to eat on cases. He’s overeager in an almost puppylike way, and she finds it endearing. She  _wants_ to hang out with him, despite all of her attempts to avoid liking him. She accidentally lets it slip to Ellen that she thinks he is cute and blushes furiously.

He’s willing to confide in her, too. Over a tiny table in a bar, he tells her the story of his absentee father, the one who disappeared out of his life and never got in touch with him or his sister again. How he found the X-Files on a whim and became intrigued, wanted to dig further. How he’s gotten some shit from higher-ups for it, but he hasn’t been discouraged. Scully thinks about confiding her life story, the secret of her sister, but for some reason, she cannot find the words. She nods along and smiles, pats his hand and tells him she’s sorry about his father. If she understands anything, it’s distance with your father.

She doesn’t tell him about her sister til a case in Iowa. A teenaged girl disappeared from her tent she was sharing with her little brother. Mysterious lights reported by both mother and brother. Mulder thinks it’s alien abduction. Scully stubbornly ignores the similarities to Missy’s disappearance because her sister is dead, and she wants to find this girl alive. But the sight of that little brother sitting forlorn and alone in front of the TV, writing down ones and zeroes, responding quietly and shortly to their questions, makes her think of her brother. Sitting on the floor of her bedroom, coloring with broken crayons and insisting that Missy wasn’t dead. It leaves a lump in her throat, leaves her quiet and distracted, spacy. She tears up when they find the girl alive, has to step away while Mulder is talking to the mother. The little brother was right there beside his sister. She wipes her eyes, presses her shoulder against the wall.

She doesn’t hear Mulder coming until he’s already there, in her personal space again, his hand against the small of her back. “Hey, are you okay?” he asks in a soft voice.

She sniffles, forces a smile as she turns around. “I’m fine,” she says, but her voice wobbles. Mulder tips his head to the side questioningly, like he can tell she’s lying.

She sighs, wipes her eyes again. “I… I had a sister,” she says in a soft voice.

Mulder’s brow furrows in confusion, and then smooth out in understanding. “I thought you only have brother’s,” he says, just as softly.

She clears her throat, wrapping her arms around herself. “I do.”

She tells him the story over crappy hospital coffee, his knee bouncing up and down. He listens attentively, and at the end, he touches her hand gently. Tells her he is sorry. She never intended to tell him, but she is suddenly desperately grateful for his friendship.

**4.** “We could investigate it, you know,” says Mulder.

They’re sitting in a tiny Alaska airport, swathed in coats and flannel, quiet, cloaked in the distrust of the evening. _I want to trust you,_  he’d hissed at her in a storage closet, and she’d felt the back of his neck, and she’d been filled with relief that she hadn’t lost him, that he was still who he was. She can still feel the rough pads of his fingers against her neck. She shivers. “Investigate what? The worms?” she whispers. “They’re gone now, Mulder. There’s nothing we can do.”

“No. No, not that.” He nudges her side through her coat. She looks at him, and he’s looking at her almost apologetically. “I meant your sister,” he says softly. “We could look for her.”

She swallows hard. “There’s nothing to look for, Mulder. My sister is dead. All we could do is try to find who took her, and the case is twenty years cold.”

He nods gently. He doesn’t push. She expected him to push, but he doesn’t. He just touches her side again, briefly, and shifts in his seat so he’s facing the gate again. “I just wanted you to know I’d be willing,” he says quietly. “After everything that happened with my dad… I know it’s not comparable at all, but I know what it’s like not to have answers.”

She bites her lower lip. She looks at her hands in her lap. “Mulder, do you think my sister was abducted by aliens?” she whispers.

It’s a ridiculous theory, and it’s not true. It’s not. But she’s thinking about it since that case at Lake Okobogee. About the lights. About her little brother, sticky-faced and insisting to their mother, their father, the police, everyone, that the lights took her sister. She doesn’t believe it. But she’s wondered what Mulder thinks.

He takes a deep breath, clearly uncertain. He says, “I don’t know, Scully. I really don’t. I… I remember what you told me, about your brother… and I thought maybe… but I don’t know.”

She chews at her lip. She blinks hard. She doesn’t say anything.

“Scully, d-do you think your sister was abducted by aliens?” he asks softly. “Is that why you’re asking?”

Her jaw tightens. “No,” she whispers. “No, of course not.”

**5.**  Mulder doesn’t bring up again, and she’s grateful for that. They keep working cases, their solve rate soaring—Scully is incredibly far from her goal of debunking Mulder’s work. They keep hanging out outside of work, every now and then: trips to the Smithsonian like the ones they took after their trip to Jersey, stopping by tourist sites when cases are over, getting a drink after work sometimes. She accidentally meets his sister, Samantha, when she’s in town and instantly likes her. She’s feeling more and more comfortable in this assignment every day. Ellen asks her pressing questions about Mulder, and she waves then off immediately. They’re just  _friends_ , she tells Ellen. Just friends. No matter how many times she thinks about that night in the storage closet, the way he looks at her sometimes, the way she feels around him. They’re just friends. Good friends. She likes to hang out with him. She calls him first after her father dies, without even thinking about it.

The funeral is hard, perhaps made even harder (as most family gatherings are) by  the absence of their sister. Bill tries to support their mom above all else—he’s been trying to be the golden child above all else for twenty years. Trying to make up for what happened that night. Scully and Charlie huddle together, as they usually do. Charlie has a lot of pent-up resentment for their father, as expected, and Dana does, too, but it’s mixed with a childhood affection that wasn’t completely stifled at nine. Billy was blamed, Charlie was stifled, but Dana was forgotten. She still remembers her father reading  _Moby Dick_  to her as a little girl, calling her Starbuck. He called her Starbuck the night he died, and it almost made her cry. She’s been trying to make them happy for years.

(She’s been in denial about seeing her father’s spirit, but it’s getting harder and harder to deny. Now that it’s over, all she can think about is the questions she would’ve wanted to ask him.  _Were you proud of me? Did you resent me? Did you know what happened to Missy? Is she there? Is she there with you?_  She doesn’t know if she saw her father, but she’s been haunted by the ghost of her eleven-year-old sister for much longer.)

Charlie drives her to the airport to meet Mulder and fly to North Carolina. He doesn’t argue with her, the way Bill and her mother did; if he understands anything, it’s grief. They’re trying not to talk about their father, which somehow turns right into talking about Missy. The forbidden subject they’ve been trying to discuss for years. Scully tells her brother that Mulder offered to help her look for Melissa, and Charlie’s eyes widen in astonishment. “Seriously?” he asks incredulously. “He offered to do that? Jesus, Danes, what did you say?”

She fidgets with the child lock on the door. “I don’t know, Charlie,” she says softly. “Missy’s been gone for so long, and… you know that none of us really know what happened that night. But Mulder… Mulder thinks it was aliens. He thinks aliens took Missy.”

She’s expecting laughter, ridicule, but she gets neither. She turns her head and sees her baby brother staring at her. “You… you don’t believe that, do you?” she asks softly.

Charlie works his jaw back and forth, rubs at her forehead. “Dana, y-you know better than anyone what I think,” he says. “I never thought Missy was dead. I’m still not sure I do.”

Dana blinks hard. She hasn’t heard her brother say that their sister might be alive in years. “Charlie…” she starts tentatively.

“I don’t know if aliens is the case. But your partner… he sounds like a good friend. And a good investigator. And maybe… maybe he can help you find answers. Help us find answers.” Charlie looks at her, dead serious. “I think you should do it,” he says. “I think you should ask for his help.”

**6.**  Dana doesn’t make any promises. She doesn’t think she can. She has a case to work. And of course, the case turns out to be personal to Mulder, and the psychic claims he can channel her father. She follows the leads clumsily, even though Mulder clearly disapproves, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She thinks some small part of her wants answers. Needs to talk to her father one last time.

And then Mulder gets hurt. Gets shot in a dirty warehouse. She shouts his name and falls to her knees beside him, thinking that she can’t lose anyone else, she  _can’t_. First Missy, and then her father, and now her best friend? She can’t. She covers him with her jacket, presses her hand hard over the wound in his thigh, tells him in a soft voice, “Hold on, Mulder. You’ve got to hold on.”

From then on, it’s not about her father. It’s about saving Mulder, saving the kidnapped kids they came to find in the first place. Mulder lives, and the psychic invites her to his execution, promises to tell her what her father wanted to tell her. Her chance at answers. But she can’t go. Something inside her won’t let her.

She goes to Mulder’s bedside instead. She confesses she’s afraid to believe. He touches her shoulder, she reaches up and takes his cold fingers in hers. “Thank you,” she says softly, “for holding on.”

Samantha Mulder flies down to check on her brother, bringing gifts and worried questions from their mother. The three of them end up hanging out in Mulder’s hospital room, cracking up entirely too much, Mulder and Samantha egging each other on and Scully scolding them half-heartedly. It’s good distraction from her grief, but it’s hard not to look at them and think of her own broken family. Her little brother insisting Missy wasn’t dead. Her little brother asking her, just a few days ago, to dig into this.

She thought she needed a criminal for answers. Thought she needed the spirit of her father. But maybe she doesn’t need either of those things. Maybe it’s time she commits to the real reason she joined the FBI.

Samantha leaves first, to go back to her hotel, telling her brother to listen to the nurses and to his partner, and to do her a favor and not almost get himself killed again. (Scully can agree with that sentiment.) She stays, longer than she probably should, until Mulder starts to give her concerned looks from his bed. “You okay, Scully? S'getting late,” he says, his voice slightly slurry from the painkillers that are definitely starting to wear off—he was a lot loopier an hour ago. “You should go rest.”

Scully bites her lower lip. “Mulder, do you remember what you said to me in Alaska?” she asks softly. “About my sister? That you would help me look into her?”

His eyes widen, soft and sincere. “Yes,” he says immediately.

She swallows, looking down at her lap. She says slowly, gingerly, “I-I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve talked to my little brother about it, a-and I know what he thinks… and I think I’m ready. I want to find out what happened to Melissa.” She looks back up, meets Mulder’s dark eyes. “If you’re still willing,” she adds tentatively.

He nods immediately, in an earnest way that suggests the painkillers are definitely still in his system. “Of course I am, Scully,” he says immediately, grabbing her hand and tugging it in his. “Of course.”

She swallows the lump in her throat. She smiles. She doesn’t know how to thank him.

It feels right, like maybe this is why she was put on the X-Files. (Which is a silly assumption, because she knows exactly why she was put on the X-Files, and she’s sure she’s doing the exact opposite, but it feels right.) Like maybe she and Mulder were always meant to walk into the darkness together. To find answers.


End file.
